Transcription
Why do some people earn more than you, even though they work less? And why do exactly these people eventually become really rich, while you work yourself to death for an average salary? No, this has nothing to do with luck or unfair advantages. It's because these people play by completely different rules. Rules that are partly 100 years old and have already determined for generations who becomes rich or not. That's why in this video, I will explain four ancient money laws to you in detail. For the first law to make sense, we need to briefly travel back to the British colonial era. At that time, the city had a massive problem: cobras. [music] There were poisonous snakes everywhere in the streets, in the gardens, in the houses, and the British government urgently needed a solution. And they had an idea that sounds brilliant at first glance. A bounty. For every dead cobra a citizen delivered, there was a handsome reward. In the beginning, the system worked perfectly. People hunted cobras, the snake population decreased, and the officials patted themselves on the back with satisfaction. But then something happened that absolutely no one had expected. Some resourceful citizens thought, why crawl through the bushes and hunt snakes laboriously when I can just breed them at home? And thus, entire cobra farms were established. People bred the snakes only to kill them immediately afterward and collect the bounty. The government eventually noticed this, of course, and completely abolished the bounty. But that directly led to the next problem. Now, the breeders suddenly found themselves with hundreds of completely worthless cobras. So, what did they do? They simply released them. And the result was that there were more cobras in Delhi at that time than ever before. The supposed solution thus massively worsened the problem. In 1975, Charles Goodhart, then an advisor to the Bank of England, formulated a law that describes exactly this cobra effect. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Let me explain, because it is incredibly important. Dead cobras were never the actual goal, but the safety of the citizens; that was the actual goal. Dead cobras were only the measure to somehow quantify this safety. But as soon as the dead cobra became the sole target, the entire system became completely distorted. The measure looked great on paper. But the reality on the streets was a disaster. And now comes the part that hurts a little, because exactly the same mistake is made by most people with their own lives. So, ask yourself very honestly, what do you really want? Probably freedom, self-determination. You want to wake up in the morning and spend the day exactly as you please. Spend time with friends, travel, pursue hobbies, and the logical plan to get there is to earn money. So, freedom is the goal. Money is often just the measure for it. But then the Goodhart trap snaps shut. Money becomes the sole target instead of the measure, and from that moment on, everything becomes distorted. You get the promotion, and for that, you suddenly work over 60 hours a week. You earn more, but you are constantly reachable by phone on vacation. The number in your account increases, but exactly what that number was intended for, your freedom, disappears completely. And I learned this the hard way myself. With my first coaching business, I was practically a cobra farmer. I blindly optimized for more revenue, more clients, more calls, more money. The number in the account grew larger every month, but my freedom was completely gone. I had built exactly what I wanted to avoid at all costs: an extremely well-paid cage. The measure on my bank account looked fantastic. But the reality was pure exhaustion. At some point, it clicked. Money was never the goal. It was always just the tool. So, I radically rebuilt everything. I no longer optimized for maximum revenue, but for my freedom. And today, I work two to three hours a day on average, travel the world, and absurdly enough, still earn more money than before. And precisely from this arises our first money law. Most people sacrifice their freedom to earn money. Yet money was always only there to buy freedom. So, they sacrifice the goal for the means. True wealth is not a bank balance. Wealth is exclusively the portion of your life that you spend exactly as you want. [music] And perhaps you're thinking now: "Okay, understood." Then I just need to make sure I become more efficient in my job. Work faster, accomplish more in less time, to get my free time back. The problem is, exactly this thought is a gigantic trap. It is the year 1865, and the English economy is on the verge of collapse, because factories, trains, ships, everything in the country runs on coal, and this coal is suddenly running out. Panic breaks out, but then a man named James Watt appears and presents the salvation. He has developed a completely new type of steam engine. It performs exactly the same as the old model, but requires only a fraction of the coal. The whole country breathes a sigh of relief. The problem seems solved, because more efficient machines mean less coal consumption, right? Well, a young economist named William Stanley Jevons looks at the actual numbers a few years later, and he was shocked. England did not consume less coal due to the more efficient steam engine. England consumed more coal, and massively more. But how can that be? Jevons' explanation is simple. Watt's more efficient machine did not save coal. It simply made coal power cheaper. And what happens when something becomes cheaper? It is used en masse. Suddenly, industries that were previously too poor to afford steam power could afford it. New factories sprang up, new railways were built across the country, and the increased efficiency did not reduce consumption. It caused it to explode. And now pay close attention, because exactly the same thing is happening with your time right now. Imagine you start a new job. You are still slow, you are just learning all the processes. You have 8 hours of work for 8 hours of tasks. That fits, but then you get better. You get faster, you get more efficient. The tasks you used to need 8 hours for, you now easily complete in 5 hours. And what happens then? Does your boss say at 2 PM: "Great job, enjoy your evening off." Of course not. He notices that you are fast. So, he gives you more tasks. You might get promoted. And at first, that sounds great. You get more salary, a nicer office, and maybe an impressive title, but with the promotion come more meetings, more responsibility, more people who constantly want something from you. You are now extremely efficient and work significantly more than on the first day. And that's exactly what happened to me at the end of 2021, when I was almost on the verge of burnout with my coaching business at the time. When I started, I was still slow. I had maybe three or four client calls per week. Then I got better. I delivered better results, conducted better sales pitches, got more referrals. The result: not less work, but more clients, more calls. Every single damn week. My calendar didn't get freer, it got fuller and fuller. And the crazy thing was, it felt like progress, because more clients meant more revenue. Everything's going well. But in reality, I was just like the English economy. My hard-earned efficiency did not free me. It caused the consumption of my own time to explode completely. I had not a single free day left. Not because I was lazy, but because I had simply become too good at the absolute wrong thing. And this is Jevons' law applied to your life. The more efficiently you work, the cheaper you become per task. And what is cheap, is consumed more. Therefore, you never get more free time through more efficiency. You simply get more work. At least, that applies as long as you are paid for your mere presence and not for your results. And exactly this small but significant difference brings us directly to the third law. A fisherman stands knee-deep in the river every morning and tries to catch fish with his bare hands. Sometimes he catches one, maybe two on good days. On bad days, he comes up completely empty-handed, but well, he survives, it works somehow. And now imagine a second fisherman. He also stands on the bank one morning. But instead of jumping into the water and reaching for fish, he sits in the sand and starts knitting a net. His neighbor sees this, shakes his head, and laughs. What are you doing? You're not catching any fish. The first fisherman catches three fish that day. The second catches zero. The next day, exactly the same, and the day after that too. From the outside, the second fisherman is the absolute loser. An idiot who doesn't work and goes hungry. But then the net is finished. And from that day on, the second fisherman catches more fish in one morning than the first in an entire week. As early as 1844, the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk described exactly this principle. The indirect path, i.e., a cleverly chosen detour, is generally more productive than the direct path. But this detour demands something that most people simply cannot endure. A phase completely without visible results. A perfect example of this is Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest people in history. Carnegie never produced the steel for his empire himself. He didn't even stand in his factories himself. What he did instead was build systems. He hired the right partners and obsessively hired managers who took over the complete daily operations. Carnegie himself perhaps made the most important decisions for a few hours in the morning by letter, by telegraph, often from a completely different country. At just 26 years old, his regular salary therefore accounted for only 5% of his income. The rest were dividends, money that came in whether he was sitting at his desk in Pittsburgh, vacationing in Scotland, or simply reading a book. The world saw a man who seemingly worked very little, but the reality was, he had simply spent years building his net without pay beforehand, and that allowed him to earn more with less work than most. Exactly this decision also faced me after my near burnout at the end of 2021. I could continue as before. More calls, more clients, more revenue, the direct path to money, but also the path that almost destroyed me. Or I could stop fishing and start building my own net. I chose the net, and that specifically meant working on something for weeks without getting a single cent for it. No revenue, no praise, no visible progress. And the people around me shook their heads back then just like they did with the second fisherman, because from the outside, it looked like a massive setback. But I knew I was building a system here that would eventually run completely without me, and eventually the net was finished, and it started generating income. Regardless of whether I was drinking seven cocktails at my desk that day and somehow lying on the beach. Derived from Böhm-Bawerk, our third money law thus emerges. How rich you become depends directly on how long you are willing to build a machine without pay that will continue to pay you later without work. And I know, most people give up at exactly this point. Building your own machine, i.e., an automated business, sounds like a huge, insurmountable mountain at first. But it doesn't have to be. I have taken all my experience from recent years and packed it into a simple 30-day roadmap. In it, I show you exactly one concrete step every day that you need to implement to build your business. Normally, I sell this roadmap for almost €10. But because you are watching this video right now, I am giving it to you for free. You can find the link for the free download at the very top of the video description. Click the link, download it, and let's continue directly, because there is a fatal mistake that almost everyone makes when they start building their own machine. And this mistake has absolutely nothing to do with the machine itself. Let's briefly jump to California in 1853. The gold rush is in full swing. Hundreds of thousands are flocking west, armed with shovels, sieves, and a single dream: to find gold and get rich. So, they dug for 14 hours a day in the dirt. A few few actually find something. But the vast majority go completely bankrupt or return sick. Yet, in the midst of all this chaos, a young immigrant from Bavaria stands. His name is Levi Strauss. But Levi doesn't dig. He sees something that everyone else in the gold rush overlooks. The gold diggers are chasing wealth, but their clothes are constantly tearing from the hard work in the mines. So, Levi doesn't build a mine, but he founds a company that sells extremely robust work pants. While most gold seekers fail, Strauss builds an empire that still stands 170 years later, even though he probably never extracted a single gram of gold from the earth in his life. A hundred years before this gold rush, the French economist Richard Cantillon had already described the principle behind it. Cantillon's observation was simple: when new money flows into an economy, it is never distributed evenly. Those who are close to the source benefit massively. Those who are far away usually get nothing. So, it's not just about how hard you work. It's primarily about where you position yourself. If Levi Strauss had sold his pants in peaceful Germany with exactly the same quality and the same effort, he would almost certainly not have become rich. He was not successful because he had the best sewing machine. He was successful because he positioned his machine exactly where the money had to flow anyway. The Rockefellers, one of the richest families of all time, even later formulated this as their house motto. It simply said: "We don't chase wealth; we simply place ourselves where the money has to pass by anyway." When I built my first business, I had no idea what that meant. I had created a digital product on self-discipline, and the content was really good. The feedback from the few buyers was great, but it hardly sold. [music] And at first, I thought I had to make the product even better. So, I tinkered with my machine for weeks, polished texts, and tested the cover in five different shades of blue. But the problem was never the machine; the problem was its location. I then sat down and sifted through YouTube comments and Amazon reviews for days. I was looking for a place where demand was huge, but supply was extremely scarce, and I found a topic that was directly related to my expertise: procrastination, i.e., constant delaying. Millions of people suffer from it, but almost no one offers a clever solution for it. So, I took the same expertise, the same work, but I positioned myself in a completely different place. The old product on self-discipline was like good jeans in Germany. The new product on procrastination was like those jeans in the Californian gold rush, and suddenly it almost ran by itself. Therefore, our fourth money law is: "It doesn't matter how good your machine is if it's in the wrong place. Those who build close to the money stream earn more with less effort. Those who build far away struggle for a fraction of it." Now, there's only one question left. What kind of machine should you build as a beginner? Which business model automatically adheres to all the laws in this video? I've tested pretty much everything in recent years, and there's one model that far surpasses all others. Which one it is and how you can get started with it today, I will show you exactly in this video here. Watch it now. Enjoy.